Books : Adobe InDesign CS4 Classroom in a Book
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 686
EAN: 9780321573803
ISBN: 0321573803
Label: Adobe Press
Manufacturer: Adobe Press
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 432
Publication Date: November 06, 2008
Publisher: Adobe Press
Sales Rank: 3757
Studio: Adobe Press
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Product Description:
The fastest, easiest, most comprehensive way to learn Adobe InDesign CS4
Adobe InDesign CS4 Classroom in a Book contains 14 lessons. The book covers the basics of learning page layout with Adobe InDesign and provides countless tips and techniques to help you become more productive with the program. Explore typography and color, and learn more about creating tables and using styles. You can follow the book from start to finish or choose only those lessons that interest you.
Create layouts for magazines, newsletters, and brochures. Learn how to make Adobe PDF files and rich interactive documents. Prepare files for high-resolution printing and the Web.
“Adobe InDesign Classroom in a Book is the best way to learn hands-on with real-world examples. You'll gain exposure to good print design as well as efficient workflow techniques.” —Michael Witherell, Adobe Certified Expert, Publishing, Training, and Consulting
Classroom in a Book®, the best-selling series of hands-on software training workbooks, helps you learn the features of Adobe software quickly and easily. Classroom in a Book offers what no other book or training program does—an official training Incorporated, developed with the support of Adobe product experts.
Average Rating: 
Rating:  -
I'm up to lesson 3 in this "training workbook", and I'm thoroughly unimpressed so far. The exercises contain no explanation whatsoever, so that all you end up doing is following the steps that someone used to design a project. What's more, at least twice (in three lessons) the steps have not worked produced the result they were supposed to: In one case, the text fields somehow ended up on the background layer, resulting in either text obscured by marginalia or graphics obscured by text; in the other, placing text into a text box made an image on the same page vanish.
In addition to these issue, throughout the book there have been areas of very unclear explanation or areas that are just plain wrong: One step instructs you to select the Semibold group for Adobe Garamond Pro, despite there being no semibold option for this font; another step instructs you to shift-click to select two different items when it should be an instruction to ctrl-click, as shift-clicking selects a half-dozen items. This is by no means an exhaustive list of errors I've encountered in the book, just a sampling--and again, I'm halfway through lesson 3 of 14.
Between the outright errors and the lack of any explanation, I would strongly advise anyone wanting to learn InDesign CS4 to go find a different book--this one is certainly not worth the ridiculously high price tag.
Rating:  -
Nowadays, if you hear about page layout, it often refers to webpages. But this book is [mostly] about hardcopy page design. InDesign is a powerful and generally easy to use program that lets you make sophisticated and professional looking pages. The book has many example images, usually in colour, which helps to emphasise the vivid richness of the output. There are many ways within InDesign to emplace text on a page. The text can be short headlines, or entire paragraphs. The font sizes, families and colours can be varied. So too with the orientation of the text.
Images and backgrounds can be readily added using layers. The latter is a key unifying idea across many Adobe products.
Also, the book is more than just an exhaustive listing of InDesign tools. You can certainly treat it as such. But it also has guidelines about what constitutes good layout. Like avoiding a cluttered or jarring look. To this ends, if you have a copy of the book, step backward [so to speak] and take a second look at a typical page. Instead of focusing on the context of the text, study the entire page layout. Often, there is plenty of white space or margin. When images appear, look at the integration of these with the accompanying text. I don't know if InDesign was used for the book itself, though you'd imagine it would be. But even if it wasn't, deconstructing the book pages offers many examples of good layout.
A possible irony here. Some readers will focus on the ... Read More
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